Abstract
Virtually everything that delineates the provincial novel is included in the criteria outlined by Ian Duncan and Franco Moretti: compactness, familiarity, distinctiveness (usually from the metropole), nostalgia‐inducing comparative backwardness, and negative definition. Yet even the most seemingly sedentary provincial worlds always contain linkages to a greater world beyond. This experience of “semi‐detachment” from the world is replicated in readers’ experiences of the provincial novel. In such works, the reader is imagined as getting lost in a book, but remaining simultaneously aware of the real world from which she or he has become semi‐detached. At the heart of the provincial novel lies not a triumph of the local over the cosmopolitan (Little Englandism), but a fascinating version of magnum in parvo, whereby provincial life is desirable for its capacity to locate its inhabitants at once in a trivial (but chartable) Nowheresville and in a universal (but strangely ephemeral) everywhere.